Readers familiar with Nick Coleman’s 2012 memoir The Train in the Night will know before embarking on this book that the author suffered the worst possible fate for a music journalist: deafness, a problem (Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss) which began in 2007, had improved somewhat by 2010, declined catastrophically, then partially returned in his “good ear” before a severe sinus infection in 2015 wreaked further havoc.

Five years might not, at first, seem like a long time between albums, certainly when you consider that even tectonic shift left the Avalanches in its wake while they were creating Wildflower. But a lot has happened to Californian indie rockers Black Rebel Motorcycle Club during that time.

If you see any list of greatest living drummers and the Australian Jim White isn't on it, you should look at it askance. Since he started Dirty Three in the early '90s, White has played with the cream of global alt-rock musicians: the Nick Caves, PJ Harveys, Cat Powers and Will Oldhams. But he's way, way more than a sideman, and the closer he is to the front of the stage, the more interesting the music will be.

The Monterey Pop Festival in California in mid-June 1967 was a key event in the history of festival culture. There had been music festivals before in the US – Newport Folk springs to mind – but Monterey marked the point where the whimsical trend for “renaissance fairs” combined with the rising first blaze of rock music, born of psychedelia, all marinated thoroughly in LSD-flavoured happenings and love-ins. And, of course, it was filmed by DA Pennebaker, making it a visual blueprint, ripe for imitation, influencing countless generations into the idea of festivals as miniature countercultural utopias.

The film, only 79 minutes long, remains fantastic. This writer was blown away by it in his teens and 20s but, decades later, it’s lost none of its potency, perhaps even gained some as its defiantly non-cynical attitude seems so refreshing in these meta times. The first thing that strikes is how fantastically everyone is dressed, how sharp, how individual, making me want to weep at the rise of sportswear which has destroyed sartorial suss the planet round. But mainly, despite a bit of crowd action, it doesn't have Woodstock's propensity for tangential asides. It’s a lean musical entity.

And what music! Grace Slick out-singing all the men in Jefferson Airplane; Simon & Garfunkel silhouetted beautifully against a red backdrop; Janis Joplin channelling Etta James to invent Robert Plant and every heavy metal vocalist of the Seventies and Eighties; Otis Redding backed by Booker T & the MGs, just so tight, so sexy, the ultimate soul man; The Who going bonkers (“This is where it all ends!”); Hendrix setting his guitar and his career alight; and finally Ravi Shankar in a long, wonderful, frenetic back’n’forth with his tabla-player Alla Rakha, just mesmerising.

However, what most will be buying this three-disc set for is the extras. As well as a 16-bit 4K digital restoration of the original film, there are the complete filmed sets of Hendrix and Redding, and two hours of performance footage that wasn’t used in the film, running the gamut from the sharply choreographed, suited pop of The Association to falsetto oddball Tiny Tim, to The Byrds, frostily falling out with David Crosby onstage, their music suffering as a consequence.

There are also various interviews, old and new (Pennebaker, impresario Lou Adler, the Mamas and the Papas’ John Phillips, Sixties PR legend Derek Taylor, David Crosby, Mama Cass), as well as audio commentaries (Pennebaker, Adler, writers Charles Shaar Murray and Peter Guralnick), photos and Richard Leacock’s subversive short film about the police, Chiefs, which was the support feature when Monterey Pop was originally released to cinema. There’s also a booklet of essays featuring Barney Hoskyns, Michael Chaiken and others.

Much of this material has been available in the States since 2004, but this set really is the complete deal, a plethora of treats for fans of the original film and, for anyone else, an untainted window into Californian music culture, just as the Summer of Love was starting to bubble. It’s one of the all-time great music films, simple as that.

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Overleaf: watch Ravi Shanker and table-player Alla Rakha play an astounding, nigh-on-20 minute version of "Dhun" at the Monterey Pop Festival

Liam Gallagher is a great rock star. However, he often comes across as not a likeable person. He’s called himself “a cunt” on more than one occasion. But he bleeds inarticulate insouciance and arrogant rage. He doesn’t raise even half a smile throughout this whole gig. He carries himself with a chin-jutting, I-dare-you posture that adds up to charisma. And he can sneer-sing the hell out of a song. All that stuff used to be what we wanted from our singers before the post-Travis era of fleece-wearing, kindly, average-guy-next-door rockers.

He comes on, parka zipped to the top, just like his audience. All Gallagher’s male fans button up to the top, zipped up, and they strut, as does he. The crowd is 70-80% male but, despite the streets of Brighton being overrun with a mass of braggadocio, the gig is less tensely masculine than anticipated. Instead it’s a celebration. He opens with Oasis, “Rock’n’Roll Star” followed by “Morning Glory”, the latter’s great opening line still sinewy – “All my dreams are made/Chained to the mirror and the razor blade”. It works a treat. Half his set is Oasis, but intermingled with new material in a way that’s persuasive. There’s a boozy party spirit here tonight. A sense that it’s Christmas and let’s not over-analyse.

Gallagher’s comeback this year, his ostensibly semi-accidental solo career in the wake of his post-Oasis band Beady Eye’s demise, has been spectacular. In As You Were he has the fastest selling album of the year, and one of its best-selling (also the biggest UK vinyl album sales in two decades!). This seasonal tour of Britain is, then, a triumphant round, a return to the limelight to match the ongoing success of his brother’s High Flying Birds. His album contains a few juicy cuts and some of them match past glories this evening. “Paper Crown” channels Noel Gallagher’s way with strummed emotiveness, the single “For What It’s Worth” has the crowd bellowing along, for “Universal Gleam” he brings on a female cellist to good effect, and “You Better Run” has admirable punk energy.

With his five-piece band and three-piece brass section, Gallagher essays his back catalogue with aplomb. Between songs the crowd chant “Liam! Liam!” as if he were a football team. His relentlessly belligerent, heavy-lidded face stares from two black and white screens either side of the stage. For the latter half of the set he's trackie-hooded like a casual Emperor Palpatine. And he’s not one for chat, the only notable asides being remarks about how Brighton & Hove Albion “didn’t do [Manchester] City”, asking “are there any hippies in the house?”, and telling us the crowd affection is appreciated. With much of it, it’s possible to see an introverted man covering his social awkwardness with bluster.

Brit-pop was the smug invention of London media sorts who basically didn’t like or appreciate rave culture swamping the country. It was the idea of a retrogressive minority, the ones who missed Sixties-style pop stars, so they invented them in a pub in Camden. Oasis, however, were the exception, a real socio-musical explosion in their own right, a Happy Mondays vibe matched with acerbic John Lennon-meets-Status Quo rock, all bullishly retro. They understood 1990s chemical hedonism better than their twee poseur peers. And the best of their songs still have potency.

So it proves with “Supersonic” which is a ballistic, wonderful rock song; with “Live Forever”, the lyrics of which are trite and silly yet human, raw and touching, sung so loudly and passionately by Gallagher and the crowd (“Maybe you're the same as me/We see things they'll never see/ You and I are gonna live forever”). We let so many left-field bands get away with meaningless abstract lyrical bollocks, after all. Then, for the first encore, “Wonderwall” achieves national anthem status, 4,500 beered-up souls bellowing along.

That’s where he should have left it but, ever perverse, as we’re all shuffling out, and post-gig music is playing (Sid Vicious’s “My Way”), he reappears to do an unnecessary version of Bob Marley’s “Natural Mystic”. It’s not reggae, happily, and not too bad either, just unnecessary. But it was also of no consequence. Liam Gallagher has already given his people what they were after and it proved a tonic. This writer left smiling to a seafront full of swaying, singing people.

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Overleaf: Watch the Shane Meadows-directed video for "Come Back to Me" by Liam Gallagher

“Back in the Sixties, before I was born…” Robert Plant has always been as amusing a raconteur as he is a deft weaver of different musical styles, and last night’s show at the Royal Albert Hall was no exception.

When Irish rock band U2 marked the release of 2014’s Songs of Innocence by loading it into everyone’s iTunes for free, it was an attempt to find a new angle on the "event release". While it was certainly that, it wasn’t, shall we say… universally well received. Thankfully, for its companion piece, Songs of Experience, the band has opted for an altogether more traditional delivery system.

Not since the 1960s has there been so much global shit to protest about! The Sixties, of course, gave us the protest song – and how well the best of them have worn. “Masters of War” and “With God On Our Side” are timeless classics. “Give Peace a Chance” can still be heard from the barricades.

First, an admission. I've never quite got the appeal of the Gallagher brothers. In particular, I've found their claims that each post-Oasis album represents some bold new horizon a little risible. And yet there is something intriguing about the brothers' 2017 output. Liam's As You Were came out a few weeks ago and now there's Noel's new one. True to form, the brothers have been trading insults all month.

They've also been taking every opportunity to claim their album's the best. That is a matter of opinion. But what's indisputable is that the two records take opposite approaches. Liam's looks back to the glory years. Who Built the Moon? really seems to offer something new. This is in no small part down the album's producer, DJ and soundtrack composer David Holmes. Gallagher and Holmes have known each other since 2013 when the latter was asked to produce Chasing Yesterday. He declined and, instead, invited Noel into his studio to make a new album. 

The result is Gallagher's most expansive record to date. Or at least evidence that he really does possess influences beyond Lennon and McCartney. Take lead single "Holy Mountain". On social media, fans are saying it sounds like a blend of the Vaccines, Mott the Hoople and Ricky Martin. If that sounds a little schizophrenic, elsewhere things are more coherent. There are a couple of sweet instrumentals ("Interlude" and "End Credits"), a nice nod to early Madchester ("She Taught Me to Fly")  and a leftfield homage to Phil Spector ("If Love Is the Law). Finally, it wouldn't be Noel without at least one tender pastiche of the Fab Four: "Be Careful What You Wish For" is like a trippy remix of "Come Together".

Musically then, it's all pretty absorbing stuff. The lyrics, unsurprisingly, are not of the same quality. "She Taught Me How to Fly" contains such profundities as "The one I love/ She's divine/ She’s out to blow my mind". No one comes to a High Flying Birds album expecting Bob Dylan, but in the hope that Gallagher Snr will show he's capable of new and interesting things. On that count Who Built the Moon? scores pretty well.

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Overleaf: Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds' video for "Holy Mountain"